Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Negative Inversion, Social Meaning, and Gricean Implicature: A Study Across Three Texas Ethnolects

Negative Inversion, Social Meaning, and Gricean Implicature: A Study Across Three Texas Ethnolects

Salmon, William

Hardcover

Series: Mouton Pragmatics [msp], Book 24

Linguistics

ISBN10: 1501519271
ISBN13: 9781501519277
Publisher: de Gruyter Mouton
Published: Jun 8 2020
Pages: 232
Weight: 1.19
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
Relying on a wealth of new data, this book argues that long-standing puzzles of Negative Inversion (NI) syntax are not puzzles at all when viewed through the lenses of Gricean pragmatics and Labovian sociolinguistics. Focusing on sentences such as Can't nobody lift that rock in African American, Anglo, and Chicano Englishes in Texas, the book provides tidy solutions to problems such as: the NI's relationship to its non-inverted counterpart, its relationship to existential there sentences, to modal existential sentences, to the definiteness effects surrounding its NP subject, the emphatic meaning with which it seems to be associated, and more. The book argues that such issues, which have been explored in the syntax and semantics literature since the late 1960s, are handled more fruitfully via Gricean reasoning, demographics of use, and a simple semantics. As such, the book argues that NI can be freed from the syntactico-semantic straitjacket into which it has often been forced. It also demonstrates ways in which pragmatic and sociolinguistic thought can be brought together to inform larger linguistic analyses.

Also in

Linguistics

View All